The World Wide Web (WWW) is not qualified as a distributed system

1.0 Introduction

This position paper mainly considers on the topic given above, which was supported by Tanenbaum and Van Steen where they have stated that World Wide Web is not qualified as a distributed system. And also this paper will depict the background information on WWW and distributed system and the counterclaims and arguments that will differentiate one and another. Lots of resources through out the web have shown out that WWW is a part of the Internet with flexible user interfaces and hyperlinks for easy navigation.

In some websites the web is pointed out as a vast distributed file system rather than a distributed computing system. Tanenbaum (2002, p.2) states that “A distributed system is a collection of independent computers that appear to the users of the system as a single computer”. So in the next section you will be taken through with more information on both the technologies. For user information, this article illustrates on both sides of the above topic and finally sum up with supporting facts that will help to make a decision.

2.0 Background Information

2.1 World Wide Web

The World Wide Web is considered as a major service over the Internet. This is achieved through connections of several web servers that contain with web pages. The heart of the web technology is the hyperlink which connects each document to each other. These web pages are accessible through web browser applications.

The Web represents the application of hypertext technology and a graphical interface to the Internet to retrieve information that is contained in specially formatted documents that may reside in the same computer or be distributed across many computers around the world. In this scenario servers that are networked, link together by a common protocol allowing access to vast amount of resources. This technology keeps on evolving whereas this uses relatively simple technologies with efficiency and growing across languages, culture and media.

2.2 Distributed System

Distributed System is known as the process of combined power of several computing devices to work together and run a single computational task in a transparent and logical way which blinds the user and appears as a single system. There are softwares which run on top of the operating system that bind all the computers together. Distributed system is more than WWW where it deals with more than a single machine.

For example, a database may exist in a system where the application will exist in another system. The user’s machine is the third machine which contains with presentation logic. All these machines are connected together and work as a single centralized machine. These systems provide the flexibility where different computers with different capabilities can be shared among users. So basically resource sharing is facilitated with these systems as well.

To be continued ....